Was the length of the golfing course intentional?

Hi golfers,
What I mean with the title of this post is that I suspect that the number of tests for this mission and their variability was chosen intentionally so as to make a 'cheated solution' (i.e. which uses the hash of the test cases) of roughly the same length (or slightly shorter if done properly) than a legit solution. If not, it would be quite a coincidence; indeed there seems to be quite a fine-tuning since adding as few as a couple more test cases would be enough to render the cheated approach inapplicable (making them random is of course the way to go if one wanted to forbid it).
I advocated in another post that the cheated approach and solution is at least as interesting (if not more so) than than the legal one. So I posted this to ask the mission author (or whoever knows this info) whether this was done on purpose or not. And if yes, does anyone have a theoretical lower bound for the minimal size of the solution (provided one sticks with the same existing 36 tests)?

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